The media acknowledges that Trump duped the media with the migrant caravan.

National outlets have pointed to the president’s relative silence on the caravan in the past week as proof of a clear political ploy to energize his conservative base ahead of the midterms—a trap many of the same major newspapers and broadcasters fell for.

He might return his attention to the caravan once a majority of migrants reach the U.S.-Mexico border (according to recent reports,small groups of migrants have already arrived). But for now it appears that Trump has lost all interest in the issue. He hasn’t tweeted about it since Election Day,despite previously stoking fear among conservative voters by making unsubstantiated claims about “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners” who had allegedly infiltrated a caravan of otherwise helpless, desperate migrants. He also called for an end to birthright citizenship and ordered more than 5,000 troops to guard the border. They are now hard at work putting up barbed wire and additional fencing along the border between Tijuana and San Diego.

Fox News, which dedicated over 33 hours of airtime to the caravan from mid-October through Election Day, spent less than five minutes discussing it in the two days following the election. The New York Times and The Washington Postran 115 print stories on the caravan by November 2, 25 of which appeared on front pages. That coverage often sought to fact-check Trump’s claims and add context for readers and viewers, but also tended to frame the issue on Trump’s terms. It also pulled attention from other news, and glossed over the major factors driving the exodus, including violence, corruption, drought, and poverty.

December 19, 2018

Facebook allowed Netflix and Spotify to read the private messages of its users.

The New York Times has published a blockbuster report documenting privacy abuses at the world’s largest social media platform, Facebook. The newspaper documents that Facebook shared private information about its users with so-called “partners” (companies that had come into business agreements with Facebook). Because of these partnership agreements, Facebook felt it didn’t need to notify either its users or government regulators at the Federal Trade Commission (F.T.C.).

“The social network allowed Microsoft’s Bing search engine to see the names of virtually all Facebook users’ friends without consent, the records show, and gave Netflix and Spotify the ability to read Facebook users’ private messages,” the Times notes.“Facebook also allowed Spotify, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada to read, write and delete users’ private messages, and to see all participants on a thread — privileges that appeared to go beyond what the companies needed to integrate Facebook into their systems, the records show.”

Aside from Spotify, Bing, Netflix and the Royal Bank of Canada, other “partners” that Facebook shared information with include Yahoo, Amazon, the Russian search engine Yandex, and the Chinese firm Huawei. Both Yandex and Huawei are known to work with the security services of their home countries. Huawei has been named as a security threat by the American government.

The list of companies with which Facebook shared your private information includes China's Huawei and Russia's Yandex -- which is to say, companies regarded as partners of Chinese and Russian intelligence.https://t.co/PbFP9D4vTj

The partnerships Facebook has created are two way streets, so it receives information from companies it does business with. One tool to facilitate this is the much criticized “People You May Know” feature.

According to the Times, “The feature, introduced in 2008, continues even though some Facebook users have objected to it, unsettled by its knowledge of their real-world relationships. Gizmodo and other news outlets have reported cases of the tool’s recommending friend connections between patients of the same psychiatrist, estranged family members, and a harasser and his victim.”

The F.T.C. has limited examination authority and seems to have outsourced its oversight duties to PriceWaterhouseCoopers, a company hired by Facebook.

Former F.T.C. official David Vladeck expressed amazement at Facebook’s business practices. “This is just giving third parties permission to harvest data without you being informed of it or giving consent to it,” Vladeck told the Times.

Early Facebook investor Roger McNamee agreed. “I don’t believe it is legitimate to enter into data-sharing partnerships where there is not prior informed consent from the user,” he told the newspaper. “No one should trust Facebook until they change their business model.”

December 18, 2018

Judge to Michael Flynn: “Arguably you sold your country out.”

U.S. District Judge Emmet G. Sullivan presided over a sentencing hearing for former national security advisor Michael Flynn, postponing a final decision but lambasting the defendant in the strongest possible terms. Sullivan accused Flynn of acting as “an unregistered agent of a foreign country, while serving as the national security adviser to the president of the United States” (although later the judge qualified those terms).

“Arguably, that undermines everything this flag over here stands for,” Sullivan said, pointing to an American flag. “Arguably you sold your country out.” The judge also asked prosecutors if Flynn could be charged with “treason.” This was perhaps hyperbolic since the bar on treason is very high and does not cover Flynn’s action. The judge added, “I cannot assure you, if you proceed today, you will not receive a sentence of incarceration.”

As The Washington Post reports, “Flynn, standing straight and flanked by attorneys on either side, looked shaken, his jaw clenched. Sullivan declared a recess to let Flynn consider whether he wanted to proceed and let the judge impose a punishment, or to delay and cooperate more with the special counsel in hopes of leniency.”

The judge’s anger was rooted in the fact that although Flynn had pleaded guilty to lying to the FBI, his lawyers had talked as if the onetime White House official had been hoodwinked by the law enforcement agency. The judge’s harsh words got them to admit this was not the case. The judge insisted that Flynn concede that he was aware that lying to the FBI was a crime and that he was guilty of that offense. Flynn did so.

During the hearing, special counsel prosecutor Brandon Van Grack made a noteworthy admission: that Flynn could have been charged as an undisclosed foreign lobbyist for the Turkish government, as two of his business associates were last week.

The Niskanen Center is a splendid policy shop, but it is not the future of the Republican Party.

Over the weekend the Niskanen Center, a Washington think tank with libertarian leanings, hosted a conference entitled “Starting Over: The Center-Right After Trump.” Writing in New York magazine, Jonathan Chait enthusiastically hailed the event as showing the outlines of how the GOP could become a responsible center-right party in the future.

It’s true that there’s much in the Niskanen’s approach to politics to admire. They are calling for market solutions to intractable social problems, but eschewing the racism and nativism that has become a staple of right-wing politics. Further, Niskanen scholars are committed to accepting empirical reality on issues like climate change, even if they lead to policy solutions that require an un-libertarian acceptance of large-scale government intervention in the economy. The Niskanen approach to politics is summed up well in their manifesto, “The Center Can Hold: Public Policy for an Age of Extremes.”

Chait was impressed enough to outline a fanciful scenario where Niskanen’s approach comes to dominate the political right.

“One can imagine a future in which the Democrats move toward socialism, opening a void in the center for the ideas espoused by Niskanen to take hold in something that perhaps shares the name, but otherwise none of the important ideological traits, of today’s Republican Party,” Chait writes. “That distant point probably lies years, even decades, away. It can only happen after today’s Republican Party is destroyed, rendered incapable of wielding power at the national level, and its governing philosophy discredited completely. The Niskanen Center is the one institution planning for what can follow after the cleansing fire.”

Chait himself presented a good argument against this scenario when he noted in The New Republic in 2012 that clever reformist policies get little traction in a Republican Party fully committed to revanchist politics. It’s hard to see how Niskanen Center policy wonks will be able to overcome this problem.

Political parties need constituencies as well as ideas. Who are the constituencies for the Niskanen Center’s version of moderate libertarianism? Evangelical Christians, the backbone of the GOP, won’t like the avoidance of cultural flashpoints. Nor is the business class likely to care for market reforms that challenge corporate rent-seeking and fiscal policy that calls for greater taxes to fight deficits.

Trump has shown the GOP what its voters actually want: culture-war theater, white nationalism and tax cuts. Even if the Trump presidency ends in failure, the GOP is likely to try Trumpism without Trump. The future of the Republican Party is not the Niskanen Center. The future is much more likely to be President Tucker Carlson, with Stephen Miller as the head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Russian social media propaganda targeted Robert Mueller.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Russian campaign to interfere in American politics extended beyond the 2016 election and went after the lead figure tasked with dealing with the problem, special counsel Robert Mueller. The finding is based on a leaked report prepared for the Senate Intelligence Committee.

“The Russian operatives unloaded on Mueller through fake accounts on Facebook, Twitter and beyond, falsely claiming that the former FBI director was corrupt and that the allegations of Russian interference in the 2016 election were crackpot conspiracies,” the newspaper notes. “One post on Instagram—which emerged as an especially potent weapon in the Russian social media arsenal—claimed that Mueller had worked in the past with ‘radical Islamic groups.’”

The Senate report makes the case that Russian interference as far-reaching and effective. “Such tactics exemplified how Russian teams ranged nimbly across social media platforms in a shrewd online influence operation aimed squarely at American voters,” The Washington Post concludes. “The effort started earlier than commonly understood and lasted longer while relying on the strengths of different sites to manipulate distinct slices of the electorate.”

Polling mavin Nate Silver, of FiveThirtyEight.com, has urged caution on the matter. In a Twitter thread, he gave reasons for thinking the Russian social media campaign had limited impact:

It's far more likely that the Russians were just throwing a bunch of shit at the wall and seeing what stuck and that basing it on Cambridge Analytica data wouldn't have been meaningfully more effective than doing it at random. https://t.co/6NZkf5s1Ww

If you wrote out a list of the most important factors in the 2016 election, I'm not sure that Russian social media memes would be among the top 100. The scale was quite small and there's not much evidence that they were effective.

For instance, this story makes a big deal about a (post-election) Russian social media disinformation campaign on Bob Mueller based on... 5,000 tweets? That's **nothing**. Platform-wide, there are something like 500,000,000 tweets posted each day.https://t.co/LI8wt6tua8pic.twitter.com/I2XOIf0rdy

What fraction of overall social media impressions on the 2016 election were generated by Russian troll farms? 0.1%? I'm not sure what the answer is, but suspect it's low, and it says something that none of the reports that hype up the importance of them address that question.

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Woody Allen allegedly had an inappropriate relationship with a minor in 1976.

The Hollywood Reporter has published an interview and profile of Christina Engelhardt, a 59-year-old woman who says she had a romantic relationship with the director Woody Allen which started in 1976 when she was 16 and he was 41. Under New York law in that era, Engelhardt (who then went by the name Babi) was under the age of consent—17—when the relationship began. However, she was not a minor for most of the relationship’s duration of eight years.

The relationship was a furtive and secretive one. “They operated under two key unspoken rules: There’d be zero discussion about his work, and—owing to the celebrity’s presumed necessity for privacy—they could only meet at his place,” The Hollywood Reporter notes. Engelhardt claims she visited Allen’s apartment more than 100 times, but never spent the night there. Instead, Allen’s driver would take her away in a Rolls-Royce after each encounter.

Nor did she meet any of Allen’s friends, with the exception of a few other girlfriends that Allen occasionally brought into their relationships to form a ménage à trois. In the words of the Reporter, she had a relationship of “enforced seclusion.”

There’s reason to think that the relationship, along with other affiliations Allen had with young women in that period, inspired his 1979 movie Manhattan.

Looking back, Englehardt is ambiguous about the experience. “I’m not attacking Woody,” she told the Reporter. “This is not ‘bring down this man.’ I’m talking about my love story. This made me who I am. I have no regrets.” But she also says “it wasn’t until after it was done when I really had time to think of how twisted it was when we were together … and how I was little more than a plaything.”

At one point, Giuliani attacked Michael Cohen, the president’s former lawyer, for being disloyal:

Giuliani: It shows all I’m thinking about is me, my own skin. And the Southern District says you can get out of jail if you do this, you’ve got three years now. There’s a real motivation to sing like crazy. He’s got to do a lot of singing to get out of the three years and he will say whatever he has to say. He’s changed his story four or five times.

Stephanopoulos: So has the president.

Giuliani: The president’s not under oath.

In this exchange, Giuliani manages to both echo gangster talk (“motivation to sing like crazy”) and also admit the president has lied about the payments that Cohen made to two women with whom Trump allegedly had affairs.

Giuliani also shifted the goalpost on the issue of whether longtime Trump crony Roger Stone provided then-candidate Trump with information about Wikileaks.

Stephanopoulos: And did Roger Stone ever give the president a heads-up on WikiLeaks’ leaks -- leaks concerning Hillary Clinton, the DNC?

Giuliani: No, he didn’t.

Stephanopoulos: Not at all?

Giuliani: No. I don’t believe so. But again, if Roger Stone gave anybody a heads-up about WikiLeaks’ leaks, that’s not a crime. It would be like giving him a heads-up that the Times is going to print something. One the -- the crime -- this is why this thing is so weird, strange -- the crime is conspiracy to hack; collusion is not a crime, it doesn’t exist.

It’s striking that Giuliani quickly moves from outright denial (“No, he didn’t.”) to a much softer claim of no knowledge (“No. I don’t believe so.”).

Like the president, Giuliani repeatedly fell back on the argument that “collusion is not a crime.” Asked about Cohen providing evidence of contacts between Russia and the Trump campaign, the former New York city mayor said, “I know that collusion is not a crime. It was over with by the time of the election.”

As Jonathan Chait notes in New York, the oft-repeated refrain “collusion is not a crime” is a bit of misdirection. “The Trumpian mantra, ‘collusion is not a crime,’ is a misleading legalism,” Chait observes. “Think of ‘collusion’ and ‘crimes’ as two large circles in a Venn diagram with a small overlap. Trump is being investigated for many crimes, and his campaign obviouslycolludedwith Russia in multiple ways. Some of the alleged crimes, the overlapping portion of the Venn diagram, involve cooperating with the Russian election intervention.”

The New York Times is reporting that two former associates of former national security advisor Michael Flynn have been indicted in a case involving undisclosed lobbying efforts to return an American permanent resident, Fethullah Gulen, to Turkey. Gulen is a rival to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, and the attempted extradition is widely viewed as a political act.

“Charges against the two former associates, Bijan Kian and Ekim Alptekin, were unsealed on Monday in an Alexandria, Va., courtroom,” the newspaper reports. “The two men were charged with a conspiracy to violate federal lobbying rules, and Mr. Alptekin also was charged with making false statements to F.B.I. investigators.”

These alleged acts occurred in 2016, before Donald Trump’s election but while Flynn was part of the Trump campaign. In July 2017, The Washington Timesreported that Kian was involved in the Trump transition.

The charges come a day after reports that the Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlüt Cavusoglu claimed that Trump administration is still pursuing efforts to extradite Gulen. Both the State Department and the Department of Justice oppose the extradition but it reportedly has support among some White House officials.

In November 2017, The Wall Street Journalreported, “Special Counsel Robert Mueller is investigating former White House national security adviser Mike Flynn’s alleged role in a plan to forcibly remove a Muslim cleric living in the U.S. and deliver him to Turkey in return for millions of dollars, according to people familiar with the investigation.” The alleged kidnapping reportedly would have involved Flynn and his son receiving $15 million for delivering Gulen to Turkey.

Michael Flynn is now a cooperating witness in the Mueller investigation.

Trump’s attempt to strong-arm the Fed is likely to backfire.

On Monday morning, President Donald Trump reiterated his insistence that the Federal Reserve not raise interest rates. The Federal Open Market Committee is scheduled to meet on Tuesday and are widely expected to announce further rate hikes. As a pre-emptive move, Trump tweeted:

It is incredible that with a very strong dollar and virtually no inflation, the outside world blowing up around us, Paris is burning and China way down, the Fed is even considering yet another interest rate hike. Take the Victory!

Trump’s habit of trying to push the Federal Reserve to do his bidding is a break from the long tradition of presidents respecting the independence of the central bank.

As Bloomberg notes, Trump’s public castigations run the risk of undermining attempts by the American government to convince the world that the central bank makes decisions based on policy imperatives rather than domestic politics. “U.S. officials have struggled for decades to convince suspicious foreign counterparts about the separation of powers,” the news outlet observes. “They’ve characterized Fed policy as the response of an independent central bank to domestic conditions, not a projection of U.S. might. They didn’t persuade all of the people all of the time—but the framing was central to America’s ability to lead by example.”

New York Times reporter Binyamin Appelbaum suggests that Trump’s move is likely to backfire:

The Fed will hike rates on Wednesday, but even if they had any doubts, the thing about Trump’s tweet is that it’s counterproductive. Pausing now would amount to crumpling up the Fed’s credibility, tossing it into a dumpster, and lighting the dumpster on fire.

Economist Paul Krugman agrees, and adds that Trump’s move is wrongheaded even if he is right about the policy outcome he wants:

Exactly. Trump is so used to bullying people that he apparently can't fathom the possibility that it won't work. FWIW, there actually is a pretty good case against rate hikes -- but Trump undermines that case. https://t.co/c6fgVHYlu0

The death of The Weekly Standard brings jeers and tears.

On Friday, The Weekly Standardwas shuttered by its owners Clarity Media Group, bringing to an end the magazine’s 23-year run as America’s leading neoconservative publication. The news of the journal’s demise raised some pressing questions: Was the closure politically motivated, with a Republican media company wanting to silence a magazine notorious for criticizing the president? Or was this, as some reports indicate, more of a business move, with Clarity planning on harvesting the Standard’s mailing list for its planned launch of a Washington Examiner national magazine?

President Donald Trump, for one, greeted the news with undisguised delight:

The pathetic and dishonest Weekly Standard, run by failed prognosticator Bill Kristol (who, like many others, never had a clue), is flat broke and out of business. Too bad. May it rest in peace!

Some who don’t share Trump’s politics echoed his dismissal of The Weekly Standard. Harvard international affairs scholar Stephen Walt pointed out the magazine’s disastrous advocacy of the Iraq war:

Seems to me if a magazine proudly lobbied for a disastrous war that cost 1000s of lives & trillions of $, it deserves to go out of biz. Its founders, editors, and chief writers deserve neither our sympathy nor our attention. #WeeklyStandard#accountability

In David Brooks' NYT eulogy of @weeklystandard, the word "Iraq" never appears, even though that war & the horrors that followed is, by far, the most consequential legacy of that magazine. People forget Brooks was one of the most unhinged warmongers there: https://t.co/hPsVku6d6c

The column Greenwald criticized was an unusually angry one from the normally complacent and placid Brooks. The New York Times columnist claimed that, “this is what happens when corporate drones take over an opinion magazine, try to drag it down to their level and then grow angry and resentful when the people at the magazine try to maintain some sense ofintellectual standards. This is what happens when people with a populist mind-set decide that an uneducated opinion is of the same value as an educated opinion, that ignorance sells betterthan learning.”

Brooks’s critique of corporate culture was unexpected, since the conservative columnist is normally loath to criticize capitalism except in the vaguest terms. Brooks described Phil Anschutz, the owner of Clarity, as a “run-of-the-mill arrogant billionaire.” Brooks also added that, “Anschutz, being a professingChristian, decided to close the magazine at the height of the Christmas season, and so cause maximum pain to his former employees and their families.”

The most balanced assessment of The Weekly Standard’s end came from Franklin Foer, writing in The Atlantic. Foer had personal reasons to resent the Standard, since he had been the victim at the hands of The Weekly Standard of what he calls “a bad-faith effort to discredit stories about the war I had published as the editor of The New Republic.”

Still, Foer was able to put his memory of these attacks aside and praise the Standard for publishing, in addition to much neoconservative agitprop, much graceful, well-reported journalism.

“But it’s worth pausing to consider why a magazine like the Standard can be pleasurable and important, even to those who find its goals and methods noxious,” Foer notes. “In part, it’s the spectacle of watching lively minds on an expedition. The Standard would go off on quixotic missions, and not all of them in the desert of Iraq. Kristol promoted Colin Powell as a presidential candidate in 1996; then he cheered on John McCain’s challenge to George W. Bush in 2000. The magazine enjoyed making mischief and enemies, which made its pages highly readable.”

December 14, 2018

A child, age 7, has died in custody of the U.S. Border Patrol.

The Washington Post is reporting that a migrant child from Guatemala has died from dehydration and shock eight hours after she and her family were apprehended by Border Patrol agents. She was part of a group of 163 migrants that had crossed the border. She and her father were arrested on December 6, at 10 PM.

As the newspaper reports, “More than eight hours later, the child began having seizures at 6:25 a.m., CBP records show. Emergency responders, who arrived soon after, measured her body temperature at 105.7 degrees, and according to a statement from CBP, she ‘reportedly had not eaten or consumed water for several days.’”

Speaking on Fox and Friends, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen said the story “is a very sad example of the dangers” of migrants entering the United States. She added that, “My heart goes out to the family.”

The ACLU issued a blistering condemnation of the government. “The fact that it took a week for this to come to light shows the need for transparency for CBP,” Cynthia Pompa of the ACLU toldThe Washington Post. “We call for a rigorous investigation into how this tragedy happened and serious reforms to prevent future deaths.” She added that the incident was due to a “lack of accountability, and a culture of cruelty within CBP.”